New Crafts: Making Bags
A beginner’s class to introduce the skills and materials required to produce a professional looking fabric tote bag that will stand up without being floppy. The bag features an interior zipped pocket, inner slip pocket, handles, adjustable and removable shoulder … More details …
Female maladies, medical and literary culture in the long 19th century
We will look at how writers of fiction portrayed deviant and/or difficult women and how society, including the medical profession, punished, chastised or managed these transgressive characters. Texts will be Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel Maria, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow … More details …
The Story of the Blues
Explore the social history that brought about Blues music and gain an understanding of its nature and origins.
More details ...Reading Paintings: La Belle Epoque
From 1870 to World War 1, the French Third Republic produced some amazing art. This course focuses on key figures such as Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. Explore their studios, follow them to the Moulin Rouge and discover what … More details …
Thomas Hardy and Gerald Finzi
Thomas Hardy was one of the greatest of English poets, Gerald Finzi one of the subtlest and most sensitive of composers. The conjunction of the two led to a miraculous fusion – songs which are truly more than the sum … More details …
England in an Age of Reform 1815-1846
We will consider the reform act of 1832 and the Repeal of the Corn Laws, alongside the flowering of the romantic movement in poetry, the early works of Dickens and the technological advances of the time.
More details ...Landscapes in Literature 2
Further exploration of British landscape writing through selected texts of poetry and prose, from industrial and post-industrial landscapes, to the “new nature writing” of the 21st century. NB It is not necessary to have attended Landscapes in Literature 1.
More details ...Stained Glass from the Saxons to the 21st century
Following the golden years of the high medieval period, stained glass suffered a major decline for some 200 years. The Victorians were responsible for a major revival, which made way for the Arts and Craft movement to take thing forward … More details …
Masters of Baroque Music (1600-1750)
Masters of the Baroque (1600-1750) : Discover the seamless beauty of some of the most exquisite music ever written, and how the great composers of this age influenced everything since. We will explore a wide range of works by … More details …
The Short Stories of Elizabeth Taylor and V.S. Pritchett
Read and discuss selected stories from two authors who have been claimed to have mapped the changes and details of everyday British life from the 1930s to the 1990s.
More details ...Genetics – the role of DNA
What is DNA? And how is it involved in inheritance, disease, gender, gene therapy? We will consider topics like the birth of ‘three-parent’ babies, and look at DNA in forensic science, viral infections and evolution.
More details ...Landscapes in Literature 1
An exploration of British landscape writing through selected texts of poetry and prose, from the discovery of wild nature as a subject for exclamation and delight in the Romantic period, including passages from Defoe (1720s), the Wordsworths and Coleridge (early … More details …
Pop goes the Easel – An introduction to Pop Art
Pop brought an end to 100 yrs of modernism. As the world was still trying to come to terms with abstraction, a new generation of artists produced a hard edged, graphic representational style. With its mix of comic book graphics, … More details …
Villanelles, Sonnets and Sestinas
Certain poetic forms have an enduring appeal for poets and readers alike. We shall read and discuss a variety of these, exploring the ways in which metre, rhyme and repetition contribute to a poem’s overall effect.
More details ...French New Wave Cinema
Travel back to the late 50’s/early 60’s France when a group of new, young and dynamic film makers shook up the way films were made. Their films took France by storm and had an influence on film makers around the … More details …